Texts in Conversation
Tobit echoes the language of Deuteronomy 28 to describe exile as a consequence of disobedience. His own trouble is framed as part of a larger pattern of national judgment, showing how later Jewish texts began to personalize covenant promises and curses.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Deuteronomy 28:64
Hebrew Bible
63 This is what will happen: Just as the Lord delighted to do good for you and make you numerous, so he will also take delight in destroying and decimating you. You will be uprooted from the land you are about to possess. 64 The Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of wood and stone. 65 Among those nations you will have no rest, nor will there be a place of peaceful rest for the soles of your feet, for there the Lord will give you an anxious heart, failing eyesight, and a spirit of despair.
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Tobit 3:2
Deuterocanon
2 O Lord, you are righteous, and all your works are righteous, and all your ways are mercy and truth: you judge the world. 3 And now, O Lord, remember me, and look upon me; and do not take vengeance on me for my sins, both for my ignorances and my fathers’. 4 They sinned against you and disobeyed your commandments, and you gave us for spoil and captivity, and death, and for a proverb and a by-word and a reproach among all the nations among whom you did disperse us. 5 And now your many judgments are true in exacting from me the penalty of my sins, because we did not keep your commandments and did not walk truly before you.
Date: 225–175 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... Tobit interprets his people’s fate as a manifestation of the covenant curses (Tobit 3:2–5; 14:7; Deuteronomy 28:63–65). He even attributes his own predicament as punishment for sin, whether his own, his ancestors’, or his people’s. His advice to Tobias reflects the conviction that commitment to the Torah will result in prosperity (Tobit 4:6). His hope for his people’s future is grounded in the promises of Deuteronomy 30–32: returning in obedience to God “with all your heart and with all your soul” will result in God’s no longer hiding His face from Israel (Tobit 13:2, 5–6; 14:4–6; Deuteronomy 6:5; 30:1–5; 32:29), so that the people will once again dwell in the land of Israel securely (Tobit 14:7; Deuteronomy 12:10–11) ..."
David A. DeSilva, The Jewish Teachers of Jesus, James, and Jude: What Earliest Christianity Learned from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 91.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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